‘Tis The Season To End Mass Incarceration

This article was submitted by the Rev. Marilyn B. Kendrix, associate pastor at the Church of the Redeemer in New Haven and a member of the Malta Justice Initiative.

We find ourselves once again in the season between Thanksgiving and Christmas when the bell ringing Salvation Army troops have been deployed to malls and grocery stores across Connecticut.

And I don’t know about you, but in this season of giving, I feel even more inclined to stop and put a dollar or two into their buckets and wish them a blessed holiday season. It is a time when all of us feel more generous and filled with notions of peace on earth and love for neighbor.

And yet, there are neighbors living among us whose lives have been decimated by laws that we have supported over the last 30 years in a misguided effort to make our state and our nation a safer place to live for all of us. Taken together, these laws have become known as the War on Drugs, and while their intent was to bring an end to the scourge of illegal drug use in America, their outcome has led to a system of mass incarceration in the U.S. the like of which has never been seen before. 

The fact is that United States holds in its prisons and jails, state and federal, a combined total of 2.3 million people. That comes to one in every 99 adults behind bars. Here in Connecticut, where we enjoy the highest per capita income in the nation, the numbers are not any better. Over the past 30 years, Connecticut’s inmate population rose from 3,800 prisoners in our state system to the current level of 16,500, an increase of over 400%, the vast majority of whom are non-violent drug offenders. 

If the cost in human lives were not enough, our bloated Department of Correction here in Connecticut, which employs one in every 8 state employees, costs us an exorbitant amount in tax dollars. In this time when we are concerned about budget deficits, we are spending upwards of $1 billion a year to keep all these folks behind bars here in Connecticut alone. 

These numbers might make sense if we had been successful in eliminating drug trafficking in Connecticut but this is not the case. What has been accomplished is that the very people whom those Salvation Army bell ringers seek to help have been further marginalized, caught in a system that first incarcerates them for what should be addressed as a public health issue, drug addiction and then consigns them to a permanent poverty once they complete their period of incarceration. 

Locked out of most housing, excluded from most public assistance including food stamps, ineligible for federal student loans and unable to secure employment due to criminal background checks that continue to show convictions, no matter how long ago, many of these people find that the most rational thing for them to do is re-offend and go back to prison. 

Laws and policies, state and federal, have set up a revolving door on our prisons and while it makes sense to drop a few dollars in those red Salvation Army buckets as we do our Christmas shopping this December, it makes no sense to keep on spending this much money to permanently exclude those most in need of our compassion from participating fully in our American dream. 

All these facts led me to partner with an amazing group of people, The Malta Justice Initiative, to write a new book, The Justice Imperative: How Hyper-Incarceration Hijacked the American Dream. This book is aimed at three communities – the business community, the academic community and the faith community. 

And while there are quite a few books out there that lay out the problems with our criminal justice system, our book seeks to provide a real blueprint for decreasing our prison population in half, reducing recidivism by 30%, closing half our prison facilities and reducing the amount we are paying, as taxpayers to keep this system up and running by 50% in five years. 

These goals can be achieved by implementing some thirty recommendations that we put forward, some of which include eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent offenders who pose no risk to public safety, by vesting judges with greater discretion in sentencing, by providing a path for early parole for inmates who complete defined rehabilitation steps, and by creating tax and other incentives to encourage employers to hire ex-offenders who pose no risk to public safety. 

The fact is that we don’t have to invent the steps that can stem the tide on incarceration in Connecticut. Other states have succeeded in passing some laws that have begun to make a real difference for them. Delaware’s 2012 Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation Act is just one example and provides us with a way to begin.

And while there are few issues that garner support from people in both political parties, bringing an end to mass incarceration has supporters among Democrats and Republicans alike. We as a nation have spent the last thirty years building a system that has perpetrated a wrong on the poorest, least educated, most vulnerable in our society. 

In this season of giving, we can do more than drop few coins in a Salvation Army bucket. We can seek to give them back their lives.